Fragile is the first project of Mapping the City. Marina Pugliese and Abby Chen, Curator of the CCC, have paired a Milan-based artist with a San Francisco Bay Area native whose visual practices have enough similarities and differences to build an engaging dialogue and question the nature of artistic collaboration.

Marta Dell’Angelo is an Italian artist who focuses her research on the relationships between the brain and the body. www.martadellangelo.itBay Area-native, Summer Mei Ling Lee, explores images of her family as a prefiguring of the unknown. www.summerleeart.com

Mirroring a story of immigration common to San Francisco’s Chinatown and North Beach, the artists will collaborate with the accumulation and disintegration of materials, performances and site-specific interventions. With an acknowledgment of the historical estrangement between the two neighboring communities, the two artists will use the dialectical tension of familiarity and foreignness to explore their differing socio-historical identities in the sudden intimacy of an art co-habitation/collaboration.

The opening event is on February 18th at 6 pm at the IIC and the adjacent Opera Plaza Cinema. Each artist will contribute an installation, which will initiate a constellation of collaborative art actions throughout the city over the course of the month. The project will be documented by an ephemeral catalogue, and will culminate in a closing event on March 13th at the I-Hotel in Chinatown.